Idle thoughts – Unstructured musings from Joel Dunn…

Technology rollup report…

Today’s the first hard freeze we’ve had this year. It’s maybe a little late…our first frost average is late October (the 23rd for Chapel Hill, with a standard deviation of 10 days), and we’ve had some light frost 3 or 4 days already), but this morning was down in the mid-20’s. So it’s a good day to sit around until the sun gets warm and “farm” some of my technology…updates, catchup, etc.

I host (but don’t curate) a website for the Boy Scout troop I used to run (Troop 449) and they Committee is starting a cub pack, and they wanted to reserve the domain, which I ordered up. I realized that the troop’s website hadn’t had a software update in a while (someone else *should* have been doing that) and I needed to update several things, including configuring the automatic backups (always backup before an update!). Had to re-remember how to set up Google Drive APIs for the upload – I’ve done this for several websites that send file backups to Google Drive, but seems like the Google API UI/UX is different each time I go there. Have plugins to update on several other websites, so I’m doing that. Needed to review my other domain names to make sure I still needed/wanted everything there. Needed to double-check the PHP version settings. Checked on another domain name I’d ordered; it’s one of the new ones, a “.blog” that won’t be ready until 11/21.

Last night I set up a new printer. I had an old Xerox phaser 8560 that was about 10 years old, and it wouldn’t print cleanly any more, the nozzles that deposit the melted wax (it uses the crayon-style media) were clogged in places, meaning colors were funky. Still printed black, but took forever to warm up, used a lot of power, etc. Replaced it with a little Brother 3140CW color laser for $170. Supports AirPrint, Google CloudPrint, plays nice with Macs w/o external drivers. Was a very easy install, runs fast and quiet, rated for ~19 pages per minute. I looked at fancier devices but we print very little these days…however sometimes we do need to print and this will take care of things nicely. The old printer could handle AirPrint thru a shim on the iMac (Printopia) but this is simpler and much quicker.

Lots of other things going on, have a Raspberry Pi 3 that’s fun…a gig of memory and a 32 gig microSD, and builtin WiFi and Bluetooth. A lot faster and more capable than my old 1 gen Pi B (both CPU speed and memory). What a heckuva Linux box in a pack (with case) the size of a deck of cards. The IoT is going to be fun but will be lots more things like the DDoS on Dyn back in October.

Speaking of hacks and protecting devices, I am now running Webroot on my Macs for antimalware. Seems to be a good fit, lightweight and fast, tho I think that the PC version is more efficient. Does reputational check on web links, which is good, as phishing, spear phishing, etc. can catch the best of us. Also just licensed Webroot for the small software firm I work part-time for; it has a nice management console in the business version.

So that’s enough for now. I needed a blog post and this is the best I could do this morning 😉